While mankind has found methods of harnessing several forces of nature, notably absent has been a successful method of harnessing the force of gravity in a buoyant environment. Previous attempts to manipulate objects in the buoyant area have consistently fallen short. These designs have physical design shortfalls that significantly reduce their ability to capture most of the potential buoyancy-based effects available to them. Additionally, previous designs have failed to capture the available potential and kinetic energy created by physical exchanges of gases and liquids, induced liquid-to-liquid motion, liquid-on-liquid friction, etc.
Hydro-dynamic drag based on physical design is a major energy reducer to any buoyancy-based device. Failure to design and fabricate buoyant machines with the most hydro-dynamic (lowest drag coefficient) shapes, causes great amounts of energy to be drained off and lost to liquid friction and needless movement by the high drag inherent in mechanical motion working inside liquid environments. Conventional designs have restrictive physical design aspects with high-drag components/designs that seriously impede each device's ability to create mechanical energy.
In other efforts, considerable energy is lost by failure to attempt to collect the energy during either liquid to gas displacements or gas to liquid displacements. When something materially changes inside a buoyancy power conversion device during the buoyancy-to-mechanical energy conversion process, regardless of the design, there has been an inability to capture the energy inherent in these energy transitions and material movements.
Other conventional designs have limited the conversion of buoyant energy to rotational power. These designs restrict the balancing of the buoyant forces by limiting transfer of drive gases amongst their buckets thereby allowing overfilling of some buckets and under-filling of others on the same horizontal plane.
Another significant design concern is the use of less than optimally proportioned bucket volumes relative to the overall device size. Some designs have overly large bucket depths that place buoyant gases too close to the device core, where more energy is used to create gas charges than is recouped during the buoyant operations. Other designs incorporate smaller than optimum bucket volumes relative to the overall device and/or reduced bucket numbers. The deficiencies of both designs significantly reduce the ability to conduct buoyant work.
Conventional designs also do not reduce frictional hydro-dynamic drag through the use of active hydro-dynamic drag reduction means such as micro-bubble injection, polymer injection, etc. Further, these conventional designs fail to manage expanding gas heat depletion of the working/drive liquids caused by expanding gases having much lower relative retained heat energy than they had in their compressed state. With the exception of a high-temperature or steam gas operation where the working/drive liquid is kept at a higher temperature, continuous operations of any non-thermal gas-driven buoyancy motor's expanding gases can quickly reduce each device's working/drive liquid temperature to a level below their freezing points.
Therefore, a need exists for a mechanical device that can reduce frictional hydro-dynamic drag, balance buoyant forces along their vanes, and capture the kinetic energy available during gas-to-liquid and liquid-to-gas transfers.